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Open-source nonprofit · Frisco, TX

Mobility aids built
for the real world.

Most crutches are designed for hospital hallways. We build terrain-adaptive aids for the mud, sand, and unpaved roads where people actually live.

See Our Solution Support the Mission
2.5B+Need assistive products
69%Fall annually from terrain
15%Access rate in sub-Saharan Africa
Rural terrain

This is not a supply chain problem. It is a design problem.

For people with spinal cord injuries, a fall on uneven terrain can cause permanent, irreversible damage. Standard crutches were never designed to prevent this. We designed one that does.

Open-source design files · Printable anywhere · Terrain-adaptive · Gait asymmetry detection · Training camps in rural India · Android companion app · Global Rural Mobility Dataset · No supply chain needed · Open-source design files · Printable anywhere · Terrain-adaptive · Gait asymmetry detection · Training camps in rural India · Android companion app · Global Rural Mobility Dataset · No supply chain needed ·
The Problem

A design failure,
not a funding failure.

Across rural India, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, most people with mobility impairments walk on mud, sand, and rocky unpaved roads every single day. The crutches and mobility aids they depend on were designed for flat hospital hallways. They were never tested on the surfaces where most patients actually live.

The results are predictable. Falls are frequent. Secondary injuries are common. And many patients quietly stop using their aids altogether, becoming fully bed-ridden not because they have to, but because the device failed them. For people with incomplete spinal cord injuries, one bad fall can mean permanent paralysis.

This is not a resource problem. Devices exist. Funding exists. The gap is design. No one has built a crutch for the terrain most patients actually face. Until now.

2.5B+

People globally need at least one assistive product

15 to 25%

Access rate for assistive products in sub-Saharan Africa

69%

Of wheelchair users experience falls annually due to terrain

<5%

Of people who need wheelchairs actually receive them

Children walking home from school, Accra, Ghana
Children walking miles to school
Group of children in rural Africa
The kids we're building this for
Family walking a rural road in Madagascar
Walking miles for water & school
Community health
Community care
Medical technology
Accessible technology
Future sites

Real terrain. Real problems.

Click any region on the globe to see exact terrain conditions and how our device addresses them.

Legend
Active pilot region
Moderate terrain challenge
Severe terrain challenge
Drag to rotate · Click a marker to explore
Seven regions. One solution.

Our pilot zones span rural India and East Africa, targeting communities where terrain-related falls are most frequent and mobility aid access is lowest.

Severe terrain challenge
Moderate terrain challenge
Active pilot region
Terrain types
Challenges
    Our response

    Back to overview
    Our Solution

    Two tiers.
    One mission.

    A modular foot attachment that replaces the rubber tip on any crutch. The passive version needs no power and no maintenance. The smart layer adds real-time fall detection and automatic correction.

    Tier 1 · Passive

    The Adaptive Foot

    • Three flexible lobes adapt to any surface automatically
    • No electronics, no batteries, no maintenance
    • Printable on any consumer 3D printer
    • Wire replaceable with fishing line or paracord
    • Three terrain variants: standard, sand, emergency
    • Free open-source design files
    Tier 2 · Active

    Smart Layer

    • Pressure sensors measure force under each lobe
    • Motion sensor detects tilt and balance in real time
    • Micro motor pre-positions foot before a slip
    • Vibration alert warns the user 200 to 400ms early
    • Android companion app, fully offline

    Detects uneven walking patterns in real time

    No crutch on the market does this today
    Person walking with a forearm crutch on uneven rocky terrain
    Every day, on terrain like this

    This is the surface our users actually walk on — not a flat hospital hallway. The geometry of the foot touching this ground is the entire problem.

    Terrain Physics

    The geometry is
    the intervention.

    This single change in geometry is why people fall. A standard rigid tip makes contact at one point and rocks off the highest bump it finds. The tri-lobe TerrainFoot lets each lobe settle independently, keeping three points of contact on the same uneven ground — color-coded below by what it's actually made of: soft mud in the low points, packed dirt on the slopes, loose rock on the high points.

    Standard rubber tip — 1-point contact TerrainFoot tri-lobe — 3-point contact
    Mud / silt — low ground Packed dirt Loose rock — high ground
    Fixed diagram · regenerate for a new terrain sample

    Standard rubber ferrule

    A flat, rigid disc. On uneven ground it touches one high point and tips, transferring the full fall-arresting load through whichever edge happens to land first — the mechanism behind the 40–70% monthly fall rate on unpaved terrain.

    TerrainFoot tri-lobe

    Three TPU lobes on a tensioned wire network move independently, each settling to the terrain height beneath it. Load is passively redistributed across all three contact points with no electronics and no moving parts beyond the wire.

    Built to fit a life, not a catalog

    Every patient walks
    differently. So we build differently.

    A forearm crutch, a walking stick, an axillary crutch, an early prosthetic concept — the terrain doesn't care which one someone leans on, and neither do we. The engineering below exists so that whatever device a person already has, it can be made to actually hold up where they live. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

    Devices
    Selected
    Tier 1

    Replaces the rubber ferrule on any forearm crutch. Three TPU lobes passively adapt to uneven terrain via a tensioned wire hub.

    Forearm crutch - Tier 1 passive foot
    Drag to rotate · scroll to zoom
    Tier 1
    Replaces the rubber ferrule on any forearm crutch. Three TPU lobes passively adapt to uneven terrain via a tensioned wire hub. No electronics needed.

    The prosthetic adapter and terrain ankle are early-stage concepts only. These visualizations are basic representations of design intent, not final products. We are sharing them to illustrate the long-term vision for where this platform can go.

    Distribution

    We don't just ship devices.
    We train people.

    Our model does not depend on a supply chain. It depends on knowledge. Once someone is trained, they can serve their community indefinitely.

    Community health workers in the field
    Training local operators to serve their region independently
    01

    Two-day training camp

    We run two-day camps in rural communities where local health workers and repair shop operators learn to print, fit, and maintain the devices themselves.

    02

    Local production

    Certified operators use the free design files and a simple starter kit to produce and distribute devices within their own community. No supply chain, no middlemen.

    03

    Lasting impact

    Each operator continues serving their region long after the camp ends. The network grows with every new camp, and the cost per patient falls each year as the system scales.

    Our goals
    2Training camps in Year 1
    50Patients served in Year 1
    600+Patients by Year 3
    200+Certified operators
    The science behind the design choices

    Every step is a readout
    of the nervous system.

    A patient with post-polio paralysis, a stroke survivor, and someone with diabetic neuropathy all fall differently — and rural clinics rarely have the equipment to tell why. Gait data collected by Tier 1.5 and Tier 2 isn't just fall-prevention telemetry — it's a continuous signal of motor nervous system function that has never been captured at scale in the populations who need it most. Different neurological conditions produce computationally distinguishable gait signatures.

    How a single step actually happens

    Walking is a closed loop between the brain and the body, repeated roughly once every second. Watch the signal travel the loop below.

    1 2 3 4 5
    01

    Motor cortex

    The brain plans the next step and fires a movement command down the spinal cord.

    02

    Spinal pathway

    Descending motor tracts carry the signal toward the limb.

    03

    Peripheral nerve

    The impulse reaches the leg muscles — the exact step post-polio and diabetic neuropathy damage.

    04

    Muscle & foot contact

    Muscles contract, the foot meets the terrain, and force is generated — watch this happen live in the muscle panel below.

    05

    Sensory feedback

    Pressure and balance signals travel back to the brain, closing the loop before the next step.

    Left limb force Right limb force
    Muscle activation, live per step
    Left limb
    Right limb

    Contraction strength mirrors the force curves above — switch conditions to see the asymmetry move from the chart into the muscle itself.

    4%Gait Asymmetry
    LowFall Risk Score
    ±2%Stride Variability

    Illustrative gait signatures based on published asymmetry literature, not real patient data — exactly the gap the Global Rural Mobility Dataset is built to fill.

    The Global Rural Mobility Dataset

    Anonymized, GPS- and terrain-tagged gait data from every Tier 1.5 and Tier 2 deployment, building the first longitudinal record of real-world crutch use on unpaved terrain at scale. Rural LMIC crutch gait data currently has zero coverage in global research literature. Five analyses are planned from day one:

    01

    Longitudinal mixed-effects model

    Tap to expand

    Tracks gait quality, stride symmetry, and fall frequency per patient across the full 90-day recovery window, separating real recovery from noise.

    02

    Neurological condition classifier

    Tap to expand

    Distinguishes post-polio, stroke, and diabetic neuropathy gait signatures from stride and force data alone — a diagnostic signal no consumer mobility aid captures today.

    03

    Terrain-stratified fall analysis

    Tap to expand

    Cross-references every fall event with the soil and terrain tag from the Tier 1.5 conductive strip — the missing variable in all existing rural gait research.

    04

    Fall prediction sequence model

    Tap to expand

    An LSTM trained stride-by-stride to predict a slip 200–400ms before it happens — the same window the Tier 2 haptic alert fires in.

    05

    Device wear & durability tracking

    Tap to expand

    Correlates lobe wear and wire-tension loss against terrain type and distance walked, feeding straight back into the next TerrainFoot design iteration.

    For the health worker, not just the patient

    Built for the village,
    not the cloud.

    A community health worker checking on a patient 40km from the nearest clinic doesn't have signal, and can't wait for it. Every Tier 2 device pairs over BLE to an offline-first Android companion app so that follow-up care happens on the spot — the same app that quietly feeds the Global Rural Mobility Dataset back to the mission.

    Real-time fall risk score

    Combines IMU tilt, per-lobe force, and stride timing into a single live score — no internet connection required.

    Gait asymmetry tracking

    Bilateral force comparison across all three lobes, the same metric that powers the neurological condition classifier.

    Daily stride & terrain log

    Step count and terrain-tagged fall events sync automatically whenever the phone reconnects — built for patchy rural connectivity.

    90-day CHW follow-up view

    A simplified dashboard certified community health workers use during baseline, 30-day, and 90-day check-ins.

    The Long-Term Asset

    A dataset that
    could change everything.

    Every Tier 2 device we deploy would collect terrain and gait data from rural patients who are entirely absent from global research. Our plan is to publish it annually, free to researchers everywhere, and eventually license it to pharmaceutical and medical device companies to help fund the mission.

    Annual public release

    Free to researchers globally under Creative Commons Attribution

    Commercial licensing

    Potential recurring revenue from pharma and medtech partners, reinvested entirely into training camps and device production

    IRB pathway

    Academic co-investigator partnership for ethics review, currently in planning

    Research publication

    Planned annual data descriptor paper for academic credibility

    Our Team

    Built by two
    high school sophomores.

    No corporate backing, no large team — just two students in Frisco, TX who believe a $4 design problem doesn't need a million-dollar budget to solve.

    Aarav Kopparam
    Aarav Kopparam
    Co-Founder · Business, Software & Research

    Aarav Kopparam

    Leads business strategy, software, and the computational biology research behind the Global Rural Mobility Dataset — including grant pipeline, partner outreach, and the gait-data analyses planned for Tier 1.5 and Tier 2.

    Business Strategy Software Computational Biology Grant Writing
    Rithvik Puppala
    Rithvik Puppala
    Co-Founder · Hardware & Product

    Rithvik Puppala

    Leads hardware design and biomedical engineering — from the tri-lobe TPU foot geometry and wire-tensioning system to the Tier 2 sensor stack, servo actuation, and early prosthetic concepts.

    Hardware Design Biomedical Engineering Product Prototyping

    Common Ground Mobility was co-founded in 2026 by Aarav and Rithvik, high school sophomores in Frisco, TX. Every design file, BOM, and outcome will be published in the open — proof that you don't need permission to start solving a problem this big.

    Contact

    Let's talk.

    Clinician, funder, partner, or maker. We want to hear from you.

    commongroundmobility@gmail.com
    469-452-0352
    Frisco, TX 75035

    We are actively seeking.

    Three specific conversations we are trying to have right now.

    A clinical advisor with LMIC experience
    An NGO partner for our rural India pilot
    A global health funder or SCI foundation connection